Pierre Bonnard, Terrasse à Vernon, 1923 (est. £3–4 million, realized £7.2 million ), via Christies.com

Christie’s London hosted two back-to-back sales on Wednesday evening that brought in a combined total of £84.9 million. The forty-five lot Impressionist and Modern sale realized £61.9 million for thirty-five lots sold. The estimate of £54-80 million for that auction included a Franz Marc painting that was withdrawn from the sale (it carried an estimate of £900,000-1.4 million). Thirty-one lots at the “Art of the Surreal” sale that immediately followed realized £23 million for twenty-five lots sold. Including a withdrawn De Chirico, the Surreal sale carried a presale estimate of £19-28 million. Bidding stopped at £5.8 million for a featured Gauguin painting (est. £7-10 million) that carried the highest presale estimate of any work offered at both sales. Instead, the evening’s top lot was a fresh-to-market Bonnard painting that broke the auction record for the artist when it sold for £7.2 million against a high presale estimate of £4 million. At the press conference the auction house revealed that the seller of the painting intended to use the proceeds to purchase land in France in order to “save horses.”

The sale room at Christie’s London on Wednesday evening, via Art Observed

more story and images after the jump…

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New York and Berlin gallerist Javier Peres, much a part of the success of Dan Colen, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, and Terrence Koh, opines on the “new, new school’ and the ways of the market [NYObserver]
The “serene mastery” of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi [WallStreetJournal] now at showing at the Met [ArtObserved]
In art market layoffs: Damien Hirst cuts up to 17 of the 22 in his studio [GuardianUK] and Pace Wildenstein cuts as well [Blackbook]

The highest priced “antique” on UK’s Antiques Roadshow is a £1m model of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North [GuardianUK] more here [BBC]
The Museum of Modern Art is armed with a Twitter account [ArtFagCity]
On the heels of his recent no-sale at Phillips, [Art Observed] Damien Hirst is sanguine on the art market: “What goes up must come down” [ArtInfo]
Over 1/2 of the best selling artists of last year were Asian [Independent]
Global art dealer Jan Krugier dies at the age of 80 [ArtForum]

Still Life (Natura morta) (1943), Giorgio Morandi via [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

‘Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first  exhibit of its size and scope in the United States, displaying approximately one hundred still life paintings and a dozen landscapes. Composed with narrow-ranging hues of cream, brown, and gray, Morandi projects a study of rhythm, balance and intricacy of shape with his identifiable style. The show includes works which span Morandi’s 50-year tenure as a painter and track the lineage of the painter’s influence upon Cézanne, Cubism, Futurism, and the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà.  In addition, the intimacy of the underground gallery of the Robert Lehman wing provides well-suited location for the subtleties of such an artist.

All That Life Contains, Contained [NYTimes]
Morandi’s Subtle Spectable [NYSun]
Tables for One [New Yorker]
Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 [Met Museum]
Museo Morandi Website

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